


Find Me

by elle_stone



Series: Cold Creeps Up the Length of My Spine [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death, Gen, Halloween, Undead, Zombies, but he doesn't stay dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 03:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21190637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Jasper is killed in a surprise Grounder attack outside Mount Weather. His friends take his body back to camp, and bury him.The next day, they find him sitting by the fire pit, covered in dirt.





	Find Me

Clarke is thinking about Monty as they take Jasper's body down from the tree. She is thinking about the last words she said to him, and the next words she'll have to say. She is thinking, with a fierce and narrow focus, about the living rather than the dead.

Jasper looks thinner, smaller, younger now, laid out on the dirt between the tree roots, pale and marked with cuts and bruises, leaves still tangled in his hair. The hole where the spear pierced through his lung is surprisingly clean. His eyes are open and they stare straight up, and when Clarke kneels down in the dirt with him, and leans over him, taking in the hollows of his cheeks and the peculiar pale cast of his skin, they seem to stare right at her. Right through her.

The boy who jumped out of the dropship yesterday, and ran through the woods, bright and awed and full of life, who swung across the river first, whose ecstatic shout of joy echoed up over the trees and to the sky as he sailed over the water—that boy is gone. Nothing of him left in this lifeless collection of bones and organs and skin. Clarke checks for his pulse at his wrist and throat, sets her ear against his chest to search out a heartbeat or some stilted movement in his lungs. But she is only going through motions that she knows will come to nothing. Some distant, numb part of herself putting on a show. 

She wonders if she should rearrange Jasper’s arms or straighten his legs, but if old Earth rituals once existed around the bodies of the dead, they have not been passed down to her. She does not know them. She does not even know how to keep Jasper’s eyes closed. Carefully, slowly, she tries to lower the lids—the only silent, respectful signal she can think of to let the others know that he is really gone—but they only jump back up again. So what else can she do? She straightens her shoulders and folds her hands together in her lap.

Then she looks up, and flicks her gaze at each of the others in turn: first Wells, then Bellamy, then Murphy. On each of their faces the exact same expression: a slack-jawed, blank disbelief. And in Bellamy's eyes, for a moment, a sickening horror, before he closes them and swallows, hard.

"What are we supposed to do now?" Murphy asks. Clarke glares at him, though he's only voicing the same question that has been running through her own mind. What are they supposed to do with this dead thing, this dead body that looks like this kid they used to know, one of their own—?

She realizes that she's reached out for Jasper's hand, that she is holding it tightly, and that his skin is waxy and cold. His eyes are still open and fixed on the sky beyond the trees.

"We bring him back to camp," Wells says.

Bellamy opens his mouth to argue, but then, as if he already knows he will be outvoted, as if he already knows he is wrong, he turns away and let out a shaky breath instead. She catches him briefly covering his own eyes with his hand.

*

Jasper's body is heavy, and their progress through the woods is faltering and slow. Wells and Clarke carry him, Wells at his shoulders and Clarke at his feet, while Bellamy and Murphy drag along the panther that they killed. No one speaks. They don't stop when the sun begins to set, nor when full darkness settles over the woods. Clarke stumbles over tree roots and the small, uneven disturbances in the ground, and her hair sticks in thin tendrils to her face and the back of her neck, but she doesn't let herself falter. She listens to the heavy sounds of her own breathing and the stomp of their footsteps, the rustling of the tree branches in the breeze. Listening for danger, she tells herself. Listening so that she does not have to think. No longer sure if her unease is from exhaustion or fear.

They reach the dropship late. The night has grown cold, and Clarke shivers despite the sweat and heat of exertion, the burning of her leg muscles, the fire in her lungs. Up ahead, two torches mark the entrance to the camp, visible as little more than a threatening orange light in the blackness. They lit a single torch of their own, not long past sunset. Murphy lifts it up high now, illuminating a macabre scene: Clarke and Wells struggling with Jasper's body, holding it just barely above the ground, and Bellamy standing over the monstrous dead animal, reaching up to wipe the sweat from his brow.

"We can't go in there," he says. "Not like this. Everyone's asleep. If we wake them up and the first thing they see is—"

"A dead body?" Murphy finishes. He swivels around, looking back over his shoulder at the faint signs of home, and the movement makes the torch cut through the air with a loud, angry swoosh. Clarke's heart jumps briefly into her throat; her whole body rattles and pounds, wracked by a spike of adrenaline that makes her want to cry.

"It would be chaos," Bellamy says. He looks to Wells, then Clarke, the expression on his face a strong, determined dare. 

"So what are we supposed to do?" Clarke asks. Her voice is too loud and makes the others wince. "Stay out with him all night? Wait until daylight to bring him in?"

No one answers. She has to look at each one of them, slowly, deliberately, not sure if she is daring them this time, or if she’s begging. She only knows that she cannot be alone all night in the dark and the cold, listening for unusual noises in the riotous black woods, keeping watch over this corpse and its unblinking eyes.

"We could bury him."

Wells, very quietly, looking down at Jasper's body, his own face half-shadow in the uneven light.

Murphy shifts his weight between his feet, and a twig cracks beneath his heel. Jasper's body is so heavy. Clarke aches to put him down.

"Right now?" she asks. "Here?"

Wells nods. "A bit closer to the camp, maybe. We'll explain what happened tomorrow."

Something in Clarke recoils from the idea, but she cannot pinpoint the feeling or its source: her tired body, perhaps, not wanting to dig; or her tired spirit, not wanting to see Jasper's body lowered into the earth. Or is this only guilt, screaming and raving for relief? She doesn't know. She has no energy to decide. So she lets her shoulders slump, lets out a long and quiet breath, and nods.

*

Muted glow of sunlight through her tent walls. Insistent sounds boring holes into her dreams.

She pictures a giant, tearing houses in two with a wild unzipping noise, crawling about over the countryside on hands and knees, seeking vengeance. 

And then somebody is shaking her, somebody much too close. She rolls over on her back and forces open her eyes. Her eyelids feel impossibly heavy, sticky and encrusted with sleep. 

Her whole body aches.

Monty is on his knees and leaning over her, hands still on her shoulders and shaking her. All she can see is the familiar roundness of his face, animated with frightening anger. She wants to swat away his face but she can't move. The details of last night are coming back to her in broken shards.

"You could have told me," Monty is saying, and Clarke feels as if he has said this phrase again and again, as if she is caught in a loop of his incredulous rage. "You could have woken me up. What were you thinking?" His hands, curved like claws into her shoulders, lifting her up and throwing her back down again. She paws at him, forcing him finally away, then sits up slowly, with painful weariness. She presses her palm to her forehead. The tent is spinning.

"I'm sorry," she breathes, because it is washing over her now. All of it. The long walk through the forest, the dead boy's weight dragging her down. Her voice shakes and cracks around the words. "You're right, I'm sorry. I just wanted you to be able to sleep—"

Monty is sitting up now, too, staring at her as if she were a stranger. Clarke can only glance at him out of the corner of her eye.

"Jasper's back," he says, his words hard like glass edge, "and you wanted to let me sleep."

Clarke opens her mouth to answer, but Monty is already climbing out of the tent. Jasper's back, Jasper's back—some other language he's speaking, familiar words with foreign meanings—and yet how could he know about the grave, that shallow, unmarked grave they dug all alone in the woods—

She scrambles after him, trips over her own feet and briefly into the dirt, then pulls herself up again. Angry notes of pain sound on her palms and her knee, but she limps along without pausing, until she rounds the corner of her tent. Then she stops.

There in the center of camp, sitting on a log next to the burned-out fire pit, clear and real in the bright morning sun: a familiar thin body, slightly hunched. 

She approaches him slowly, and from a distance, describing a long circle to his left. He's still wearing the pants and boots they found him in, thin cuts and ugly bruises on his bare chest and arms and back, new streaks of dirt across his skin and in his hair. He doesn't look up as Clarke comes near. He doesn't stir, but she can see from the movement of his thin frame that he is breathing.

Monty ducks out of one of the tents, carrying a sweater. He drapes it over Jasper's shoulders. He tries to coax him to slide his arms into the sleeves, but Jasper holds himself limp and uncooperative. Monty wraps an arm around him instead, rests his forehead on Jasper's shoulder and closes his eyes. He's holding Jasper so closely and with such force that Clarke can feel the tension in him, as if it were tension in her own body, and she wishes fervently that she could retreat. She is so miserably cold. And what she's watching now was never meant to be seen.

She wills herself to take a single backward step, but the crunch of leaves beneath her heel makes Monty look abruptly up. Beneath that steadfast, unblinking stare, she feels as if she were stone herself.

"I found him sitting here this morning when I got up," Monty says. "Just like this. He hasn't said a word. What were you thinking just leaving him out here? You should have woken me up." His hand reaches blindly for Jasper's hand, holds it so tightly that Monty's knuckles turn white. 

And Jasper's hand twitches and starts, slowly, to turn. 

*

"Yeah, that's pretty much what I expected," Murphy says, as he toes his boot into the soft, upturned earth. 

"You expected we'd find an empty grave,” Bellamy asks, “in the same spot where we buried a body last night?" He’s holding his arms tight across his chest, spits out the words in a narrow and strangled voice. Then he shakes his head, lets out a deep breath, and starts to pace. Stops again, just as abruptly, and crouches down. Clarke watches him out of the corner of her eye, examining the dirt, the useless, opaque dirt, as if everything might suddenly make sense a little closer to the ground.

"When I saw him wandering around camp this morning, yeah," Murphy answers. "I figured he probably wasn't also still in the ground."

"Because that would be weird," Wells mutters under his breath.

Clarke shoots him a glare. Of all the times to have a sense of humor, he picks this one: while they’re standing around and staring at a messy, dark hole in the ground.

Pricks of cold sweat inch down her spine.

An open grave. Rich, black soil sifting through Bellamy's fingers, clinging to his skin, and above them, the morning's sun now obscured by a collection of thick, gray clouds. A wind blows past them, shadows abruptly shortening, and Clarke shivers and wraps her arms around herself.

"So what are we saying, here?" Bellamy asks. "That we buried him alive? And then he—clawed his way out?"

"We didn't bury him alive," Clarke snaps, and Bellamy hauls himself back to his feet.

"Calm down, Princess. I wasn't insulting your medical skills—"

"He was dead,"she growls, through gritted teeth. "You were there, you saw—" She turns abruptly to Wells, gestures toward him with a wide sweep of her arm. "You helped carry him. He's dead."

Somewhere distant in the forest, a bird is chirping. The clouds above converge, blocking out the last of the sun.

"So if Jasper's dead," Murphy asks, "who's that guy with Monty who looks just like him?" He kicks a bit of dirt back into the disrupted, empty grave. "And where's the body we buried last night?"

Clarke opens her mouth, though she has no answer, but Wells cuts her off before she can speak. "I think the more important question here is, what are we going to do now?"

"What can we do?" Bellamy asks. He's started to pace again, restless, his hands on his hips. "Are we supposed to—to kill him?"

Clarke feels her lungs starting to narrow and constrict inside her chest. She tries to breathe deep but they won't let her. Sickness and bile are rising in her gut. Bellamy's words cut sharper than the wind that threatens, this harbinger of a cold autumn storm, and yet, wasn't she thinking just the same? Weren't they all thinking the same?

Murphy scoffs. "Kill him?" he echoes. "Again? What makes you think he'd even stay dead?"

*

Even Monty acknowledges that Jasper is different now. He doesn't speak, and barely eats: only the occasional nuts and berries when Monty presses them into his palm. He disappears into his tent when the rest of the camp heads off to sleep, but he doesn't sleep, only lies on his back and stares up at the dark. He's always the first one awake at dawn. 

Interacting with him is nearly impossible. Even his presence in a group leaves those around him with an indescribable, uncanny sense that something is off. His attention is eerily focused, but never on the right person or object, and he does not respond when spoken to. He sits next to the fire pit for hours, or on the dropship ramp, watching his own feet as he kicks them back and forth through the air. Sometimes he simply follows Monty, relentlessly, persistently, like a shadow or a ghost.

Rumors start to spark and fan through the camp: that he's gone deaf, that he’s mute, that he's brain damaged. That he was the subject of wild Grounder experiments. That he's fucked up for life. Sterling claims to have found him once, crouched in the shadows behind the dropship, devouring whole handfuls of dirt spiked with broken sticks. Bits of earth clung to his mouth and chin and his eyes were crazed and open and unseeing.

Monty almost starts a fight with him over this gruesome campfire talk. Don't be a fucking dick, he snarls. Tells them all again that Jasper's been through something, something traumatic, something that the rest of them can't understand. That he'll get better. That he's already getting better.

Maybe. 

But Clarke still jumps when she hears his uneven footsteps crunching across the leaves and broken sticks, the detritus swept in at the last storm. Jasper doesn't walk like he used to either. His steps twist and cross over each other, as if he didn't quite understand the use of his own legs. 

Sometimes he and Monty sit together by the fire, Jasper with his head on Monty's shoulder and both arms wrapped around him, staring at the flames without blinking. Clarke holds her hands tight in her lap and watches them, and tries to think, to think, beyond the brutal pounding of her heart.

*

They don't talk about it again, she and Bellamy and Murphy and Wells. But she catches their eyes sometimes, at odd moments, knows they're waiting just like she is. Waiting and waiting like the wind blowing hard and strong between storms, waiting like breath held in the middle of the night. 

She starts borrowing Bellamy's gun whenever she has to cross beyond the perimeter of the camp.

*

One night at dusk, she finds Jasper sitting at his grave, cross-legged in the dirt, gnawing on a panther bone.

She stands completely still and watches him. The rain has passed, but errant water droplets fall in an off-pattern from the tree leaves, down onto the fallen leaves, soft little sounds in the quiet and the gray. The only other sounds: low growls from deep in Jasper's throat, animal growls as he chews at the hard, white bone.

When he's finished, he throws the bone roughly away. He starts to sink his hands into the disturbed, black dirt, curling his fingers in it, digging his nails into it. On his face an expression both furious and desperate, searching and seeking and despairing, and Clarke feels her breath painfully caught up in her throat. She's never seen him like this before. She's never been scared of him like this, scared not just of what she knows he is, this impossible thing that he is, but of what he might do, of what he might want—but she feels pity, too.

He is clawing so manically through the dirt. 

_He's been through something traumatic. Something you can't understand._

She takes a step forward, and Jasper's head shoots up. He notices her for the first time; his narrow eyes gleam through the gathering shadows.

"Jasper..."

His name so quiet that the sound is almost lost in the space still between them.

He shakes the dirt off his hands and jumps to his feet. Clarke steps back again. He is evolving, she thinks, learning—such control now over his lanky, thin limbs. But he doesn't approach, and after a moment of silence, he tilts his head at her in question.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

He opens his mouth, but it takes him a few tries to speak. His voice is creaky and disused, sounds like the dirt they buried him in.

"Looking."

"For what? What are you looking for?"

He gestures, vaguely, with his dirt-streaked hands. "For—time lost. What happened to me."

Clarke's jaw falls open, and her eyebrows furrow in above her nose. She starts stepping closer. She can feel the gun she has tucked into her waistband, shifting with each step.

"What I am now,” Jasper says.

"I—wish I could tell you that. I wish I knew how this happened. I wish I could undo it all—"

She reaches behind her, fingers grasping for the grip of Bellamy's gun.

Jasper watches her with unfamiliar, uncertain eyes. For the first time since she saw him, sitting by the fire pit, dead-gaze focused on the spot where the last embers burned out, he looks human. Or almost human.

She wants to ask him, do you know who you are? do you remember who you used to be? But these questions feel distant and small. Stupid and unimportant now that she sees him for what he is. She lets the tension in her shoulders go. She lets her shaky held breath go. 

"Are you happy?" she asks.

Jasper stares at her as if the question were foreign and inscrutable to him. Then he looks back over her shoulder, toward the dropship camp. Clarke follows his gaze. In the distance, she sees two new lights flare to life: the same torches at the entrance that once guided her home. 

She lets go of the gun and reaches out for Jasper's hand. 

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally going to end with Wells dying and Clarke burying him in the same spot, hoping he would return, but I didn't feel like the mechanism by which Jasper returned was clear enough. Also I thought the pacing worked better this way.
> 
> You can find a moodboard for this fic on my tumblr [@kinetic-elaboration](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/188617514015/find-me-jasper-clarke-the-delinquents-33k).


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